Free speech absolutist my ass.

Good! The less people buying new cars the better.

The funny thing about all this, is that people keep acting like Putin is some rational actor who can be bargained with.

But he’s not, listen to his speeches, listen to what he says he believes and wants. Some of it may be propaganda for internal consumption, but a lot of it seems consistent with his actions.

He sees the existence of an independent Ukraine as an existential threat, he ether wants it gone or under a puppet regime that he has throughly locked down. He doesn’t believe that Europe and the United States want peace, he is convinced that there is a shadowy deep state in Europe and the US that holds a consistent foreign policy across multiple administrations across multiple countries, and he see that foreign policy being to subjugate or destroy Russia.

The man has surrounded him self with conspiracy theorists, from disciples of Lyndon LaRouche to advocates of Eurasianism. He is detached from reality, swirling about a toilet bowl of yes men. He is not someone who can be compromised with or offered off ramps, he’s been repeatedly given off ramps and rejected them every time, thinking them to be traps.

The only end of this conflict is when internal power structures in Russia shift away from conspiracy theorists, or Russia’s ability to commit aggressive action is less than the defensive capabilities of its neighbors.

That’s not about the social credit system though, that’s about the general censorship and surveillance apparatus. Which although robust and invasive is quite fragmented, there is no central database. local branches of law enforcement or internal intelligence or a million other parts of china’s own alphabet soup, manage, collect and use surveillance data, some terrifyingly effectively, some pathetically. Some not at all.

China is a big country with a lot of tasks being delegated to lower authorities, (and delegated from them to even lower authorities). Anytime I see someone talk as if the Chinese government is a monolithic entity it makes me want to pull my hair out. 90% of the time when someone talks about some new law in Beijing being created, they’re misrepresenting the reality, which is generally that the central government has directed provincial and local governments to pass their own laws and implement their own policies to address what ever Beijing has talked about.

For references about social credit in particular here you go:

https://jamestown.org/program/far-from-a-panopticon-social-credit-focuses-on-legal-violations/

https://logicmag.io/china/the-messy-truth-about-social-credit/

So, it’s worth clarifying the nature of the this kind of “law” passed in Beijing. Which this article fails to do and comes across to me partially as fear mongering because of it.

Generally speaking when Beijing passes a law like this, they are not passing a law as we know it, it is a set of guide lines for the leaders of local provinces to implement their own policies and laws based on what they think will accomplish the goals set out from Beijing. Then Beijing observes what they come up with and if they like the outcomes of one, they implement it country wide.

For instance when everyone was hyper ventilating about “ ALL OF CHINA IS LITERALLY 1984 BECAUSE OF THE NEW SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM” in reality, Beijing had just essentially just asked the provinces to create their own systems that fallowed a vague guideline. And the provinces did, some provinces set up systems that would give people fines for saying mean things, some just set up an American style credit score system. In the end Beijing didn’t really find that any of them lived up to what they were asking for and all of the programs were quietly spun down.

It’s likely this will end in a similar manor.

I remember a while back stumbling arose a forum or web page or something that was just a list of web cams that had ip’s anyone could connect to through a browser, part of it was people playing a sort of geo guesser game and figuring out out exactly where the camera was.

Always felt super weird and surreal, like, I remember two in particular, one was probably a cam in some officer building in Japan. I sat there and watched this guy work on his computer for a like a minute and realized this dude probably had no idea he was being watched by some random weirdo.

Another was a camera on what was probably a Venezuela oil rig, this one had little in built servos so it could pan left right up and down, the inputs for this were open along with the video feed. I wiggled it up and down a bunch out of fascination for like a minute, then a guy I. A hard had and a high vis fest was walking by, he froze and looked at the camera. I stoped moving it and then slowly nodded it up and down. He just started and I closed the page, feeling a little freaked out.

To this day I refuse to have a web connected camera uncovered in my home, I put post its or tape over anything I can’t physically get rid of.

Well, the government is currently run by the ANC, and the statement was made by them.

Like, yah the ANC is supper corrupt and serving as a mouth piece for those business interests that benefited for apartheid, plenty of criticism to be levied at how they’ve failed to address inequality in the country and let important infrastructure fall apart while rich funks loot the country blind.

But they’re the party who cut their teeth on opposing apartheid and settler colonialism? Like, that’s their whole thing? They’re literally Nelson mandala’s party? If anyone is qualified to be criticizing Israel for their apartheid system and settler colonialism it is them.

I can both hold them in contempt for being shit heads and recognize that they might know what they’re talking about when is comes to criticizing apartheid?

Frankly, I think we should take this kind of stuff as a moment to consider where we could rebuild public infrastructure to prevent people having to own cars in the first place.

If any country in the world has a leg to stand on about criticizing an apartheid state like Israel…

South Africa’s government is a mess but most of the people in it lived through apartheid. Regardless of other issues, this is something that they are absolutely qualified to speak on.